We move beyond depression and anesthesia to examine ketamine’s role in fighting one of the most severe types of chronic pain imaginable: Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). This condition is marked by wildly disproportionate and persistent pain , exemplified by the case of a 15-year-old athlete whose simple hand fracture healed, but whose nervous system got stuck in a pathological pain loop.

The core problem in CRPS is central sensitization—the brain and spinal cord jamming the “volume knob” for pain on maximum, where a light touch (allodynia) is interpreted as excruciating.

Traditional treatments fail because the problem is upstream, residing in the central nervous system (CNS). Specialists employed a clever, multimodal strategy to finally break this refractory pa ...